Deep dive into a sophisticated zero-click iMessage exploit
— turning an obscure image compression format for PDFs into a Turing-complete virtual machine #WebXR projects on Glitch
— highlight of browser-based AR and VR projects on Glitch available for remixing #CHUNGUS 2, a 1Hz Minecraft CPU
— capable of running Tetris, Snake, and more in real-time with MCHPRS, a server that speeds up redstone computation by up to 180x via Nelson Minar #TikTok Couch Guy writes about the experience of being investigated online
— he was at the center of a low-stakes relationship conspiracy theory #Everything Is A Remix Part 2 (2021)
— Kirby Ferguson continues remixing his ten-year-old remix series, this one focused on copying in film #Businessweek Jealousy List 2021
— as always, amazing roundup of articles their staff wish they’d written this year via Kottke #Taylor Lorenz interviews the creator of Birds Aren’t Real
— their merch continues to be the best-looking of any other conspiratorial cult #Yankee Candle’s Stages of Abstraction
— “The experience itself has no aroma or shared understanding.” #Remote workers are using “mouse movers” to stay active while AFK
— put your optical mouse on your phone and play one of the “mouse jiggler” videos on YouTube full-screen via @molleindustria #Dining at the worst Michelin-starred restaurant ever
— at least they got a balloon and a story for their mere $150-225 per person via Today in Tabs #Interview with the woman behind Depths of Wikipedia
— a very entertaining follow on Twitter, TikTok, and Instagram #Discord testing Premium Memberships to let creators monetize servers
— lock channels or entire servers to paying members in exchange for a 10% cut of revenue #Modern for Wikipedia
— Chrome add-on reskins Wikipedia with a more readable theme via Nelson Minar #Family safety app Life360 is selling precise location data on tens of millions of users
— even without names or phone numbers, “anonymized” real-time location data can be reidentified via @themarkup #Trump’s GOP is preparing to subvert the next election
— Barton Gellman’s cover story for The Atlantic on how January 6 was practice for the next coup #New Yorker profile of Succession’s Jeremy Strong
— a revealing look at the actor who plays Kendall Roy, who seems perfectly cast for the role but completely insufferable via @caseyjohnston #Charlie Warzel interviews Spotify power users
— one spent 432,870 minutes, or 300 straight days, listening to Spotify last year #Doja Code
— Girls Who Code made an interactive Doja Cat music video for young coders with editable CSS/JS/Python values via @GirlsWhoCode #TikTok drama channels are turning into online intelligence agents
— Garbage Day’s Ryan Broderick on how the algorithm boosts crowdsourced investigations #Wombo Dream
— quick free app to generate AI art from text prompts, likely VQGAN+CLIP under the hood via The Verge #Max Read on web3
— very good roundup of thoughts and threads from enthusiasts, detractors, and the rare voice in between #Amazon Brand Detector
— an offshoot of The Markup’s investigation into how Amazon favors their own house brands and exclusive products via The Verge #Team builds the first living robots that can reproduce
— “Xenobots” can gather cells inside their Pac-Man-shaped “mouth,” assembling robot babies capable of self-replication when they grow up #Beifall
— clap your hands in this weird little web toy from the creators of KIDS and PLUG & PLAY via @any_user #Casey Newton on Jack Dorsey stepping down as Twitter CEO
— and what to expect from his successor, crypto-enthusiast CTO Parag Agrawal #NYT interviews Jack Ferver, the little lad who loves berries and cream
— a Starburst ad that went viral online in 2007 blew up again 14 years later, thanks to Justin McElroy and TikTok #Disney’s FastPass: A Complicated History
— Defunctland hired an industrial engineer to build a theme park simulation for this feature-length documentary #Ed Yong talks to health-care workers with long COVID
— dismissed by their peers, some medical professionals are re-evaluating how they’ve treated their own patients #AI breaks NES Tetris
— love the glitches introduced as it blows past the kill screen via Web Curios #How Facebook and Google fund global misinformation
— investigation into how millions of ad dollars bankroll clickbait actors, funding disinformation campaigns internationally via Garbage Day #Trackers: The Sound of 16-Bit
— Stuart Brown goes deep into chiptune for a new episode of Ahoy via @soobrosa #Garbage Day unravels the mystery of Thinkarete Lifestyle, Facebook’s most viral publisher
— a “barely active drop-shipping scam page full of stolen video content” is the most widely-viewed page in the U.S. this year #Justin Ling interviews the reclusive creator of Pictures for Sad Children
— she deleted the comic and her presence online after a 2014 Kickstarter update blew up online #Apple announces self-service iPhone repair program
— getting ahead of FTC right-to-repair enforcement #Skittish Is Live!
As you may remember, I’ve spent the last few months working on Skittish, a playful space for virtual events and gatherings of all kinds — requiring only a browser and microphone, using spatial 3D audio to talk to others around you. Skittish was built in a 3D engine with a powerful but simple editor, making it easy to customize the world.
It took some time, but I’m happy to say Skittish is now open to everyone, along with a new homepage and public demo showing how it works. Anyone and everyone can now create their own world, start editing, and invite others to join you. Go try it out!
Huge thanks to all the beta testers, event organizers, and creators who used Skittish over the last few months, but special thanks to the XOXO community for their continued support and enthusiasm.
And extra extra special thanks to Simon Hales, lead engineer for the project, for everything he’s done to make using Skittish (and working on it) so joyful.